JOHN CONSTABLE 1776-1837

John Constable was born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, on June 11, 1776. He was the son of the rich miller. The countryside around his birthplace is pastoral and gently undu­lating, marked chiefly by the low hills flank­ing Dedham Vale, along which the River Stour ran. The artist’s father, Golding Con­stable, owned mills on the banks of the riv­er, made navigable by locks in the 18th cen­tury. The landscape setting of his early years influenced Constable greatly. His choice came to be limited to a small group of plac­es in which his affections were deeply en­gaged, all sharing the pastoral quality of the scenes of his childhood. He showed an early aptitude for drawing landscape and capturing climatic effects in his locality. He was later to say: “These (Suffolk) scenes made me an artist”.

A youthful friendship with an artisan who was an amateur painter aroused Constable’s own ambitions; but up to his 20th year his work was painfully lacking in ability, and it was intended that he should follow his fa­ther’s calling. He went to London in 1799 to begin his formal artistic training in the schools of the Royal Academy. At this time the mod­el for landscape painting in England was still the classical ideal landscape of the 17th centu­ry. Works by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin* were in every large collection, and a contemporary artist was expected to conform to the principles of formal composition, light­ing, and detailed finish which marked their pictures and even to imitate their tonality, distorted though this might be by a century or more of discoloured varnish.

Poussin, Nicolas (1594-1665) — most significant 17th-century French painter, a master of the Classical school.

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Constable re­alized that within such limitations he could not paint the English countryside as he saw it, and in his search for more suitable meth­ods he created his own art.

In 1802, he began the practice of sketching in oils in the open air, the form of study, which he continued throughout his life. His nature sketches are fresh and brilliant and give direct contact with the mind of the artist, but to him they were the exercises and the raw material out of which he could create more ambitious and logically con­structed landscape. Constable’s originality was soon recognized and he received help from Benjamen West*, the president of the Royal Academy.

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* West, Benjamen (1738-1820) — American-born artist, who set up in London in 1763.

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During the formative period, from 1800 to 1810, Constable attempted to follow the usual practice of making sketching expedi­tions to a countryside of recognized roman­tic beauty. In 1801, he went to the Peak District* and in 1806 to the Lake District.

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* Peak District — a picturesque countryside in North Derby­shire

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Unlike his contemporaries, he found that mountains did not exhilarate but depressed him, and he made no further sketching tours. A casual visit to a new scene could not replace for him the long process of get­ting to know a landscape intimately, and accordingly he went year after year from his London home to visit his close friends in the southern counties. During this time he painted two altarpieces for local church­es. He made efforts to succeed as a portrait painter, the chief means of earning a living then available to an English artist. By 1810, he was producing oil sketches of the coun­tryside in which he achieved natural col­our, and rich atmospheric quality, free from the shackles of past formalism.

The years 1810 to 1815 were years of in­tense concentration on his painting. In 1813 and 1814 Constable filled two small note­books with hundreds of studies of the fields near his birthplace. These sketchbooks, which have all the fascination of an inti­mate diary, were often drawn on for the paintings he made in later years; in them he is seen to return to the same scene day after day; drawing it under varying lights and seeking for a viewpoint in which his subject formed a naturally balanced com­position.

Constable began to gain some recognition. He sold his first painting to a stranger in 1814 and was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy in 1819. He felt confident enough to embark upon a series of large canvases, the subjects of which were taken from the banks of the River Stour and which he exhibited in successive years at the Roy­al Academy. Among them were “The Hay Wain” (1827), “View on the Stour near Ded­ham” (1822), “The Leaping Horse” (1825).

In 1811, Constable formed a close friend­ship with John Fisher, a clergyman living in Dorsetshire and later in the cathedral town of Salisbury. The friendship was not only a great encouragement to the artist, because of Fisher’s understanding of his work, but widened his choice of themes. On his many visits to Fisher’s house Constable made a number of sketches, and these he used when he was commissioned to paint “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds” (1823) a subject he used several times. His range of subjects was further extended in 1819, when he moved his fam­ily to the summer months to Hampstead, a village on a hill on the northern outskirts of London, then surrounded by open coun­try. This more became an annual custom, eventually, he took a house in Hampstead. Here he began a long series of sky studies, based on the conviction that only one as­pect of the sky was consistent with a par­ticular kind of illumination of the objects on the ground. On the backs of his studies he usually recorded the date, the time of the day, and the weather conditions pre­vailing at the time they were painted.

At Hampstead Constable found a new type of subject unused by any landscape painter, the combination of suburban buildings with rural surroundings, as exemplified in “A Romantic House” (1832).

The paintings exhibited yearly at the Royal Academy were based on such sky studies and on many oil and pencil studies of the main scene and of subordinate details.

With the exhibition of “The Hay Wain” at the Royal Academy in 1821 Constable’s work became known to French artists. His works were shown in Paris in 1824 and were a great success. “The Hay Wain” was award­ed a gold medal, and Constable’s influence over the younger French artists, in partic­ular Delacroix*, dated from this event.

In 1824, Constable’s wife’s increasingly poor health caused Constable to take her to Brighton, a fashionable seaside resort on the South coast. He found the landscape of the surrounding country unsympathet­ic, but he set to work on oil studies and drawings of the beach and shipping, many of which were really remarkable. Consta­ble became more and more concerned with what he called “the chiaroscuro of the Na­ture”, a term covering the broken lights and accents caused by the reflection of sun­light on wet leaves and the alternation of lights and darks in the sky and the shad­owed landscape. To Constable’s contempo­raries his painting looked unfinished, and the glazed highlights with which he en­hanced them became known as “Constable’s Snow”.

That Constable was now established as a landscape painter is shown in the number of repetitions he was called upon to make from his more popular compositions. Among the subjects he repeated most often, though always with some variation in the lighting and mood, were “Dedham Mill” (1820) and “Hampstead Heath” (first version 1828).

In 1829, his wife died, and election in that year to full membership in the Royal Acad­emy he regarded without significance. In 1830, he began to issue a series of mezzo­tint engravings under the title “English Lan­guage Scenery”. It was designed to illus­trate Constable’s range in landscapes, cho­sen especially with a view to recording the “chiaroscuro of Nature”.

From this time onward Constable was sub­ject to fits of depression. He had been left with a family of seven young children and forced himself to extra exertions on their behalf. He was working on the picture the day he died in 1837, but it was sufficiently finished to be exhibited posthumously at the Royal Exhibition of that year.

Constable’s large finished pictures, pro­duced for the exhibitions at the Royal Acad­emy, were necessary to his acceptance as an artist. His own real interest, though, lay in his sketches and it is these works which have excited the interest of all paint­ers since his death. It is necessary to clar­ify the use of the word “sketch” in this context. These were not rough unfinished works or merely notes. In their free, broad and spontaneous way they were carefully considered and were complete in their pic­torial statement. In them, Constable catches the effects of rapidly changing light, show­ing for example how patterns of light change on a landscape and clouds scud across the sky. They embody his most im­portant contribution to European art and explain his work made such an impact upon the Impressionists*.

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*Impressionism — a style of painting (used especially in France between 1870 and 1900) which produces effects (especially of light) by use of colour rather than by details of form. The French impressionists painted directly from nature.